A user under the pseudonym Andrew cracked the seed phrase in less than half an hour and won a reward of 0.001 BTC, or about $29.
Thanks for dinner brotha!
Also… use 24 words people… 😉 pic.twitter.com/GtwgckSlqS
— Andrew (@dAnconiaMining) April 26, 2023
The corresponding competition was launched by the author of the educational bitcoin account Wicked.
“Does anyone want to try this 12 word seed and get 100,000 sat? I will give all the words, but in no particular order. Standard generation path, no tricks…”, he signed the image with the words and address.
The mnemonic phrase allows you to restore access to the BTC wallet. It is a user-friendly representation of a large random number (entropy) that is used to generate bitcoin keys. To compose a phrase, 2048 certain words from the English language are used.
Wicked noted that all 12 of the 12 known elements still give 1212 or about 479 million possible combinations.
The users involved in the contest mostly commented on their attempts without enthusiasm.
“I tried at least six times. It’s so frustrating that it pleases, ”admitted one of them.
I tried atleast 6 times. So frustrating its good
— BitcoinBoet (@BitcoinBoet) April 26, 2023
However, a minute later, Andrew published a screen with the found phrase and a withdrawal transaction with a signature:
Thanks for lunch bro! What else to say… folks, use 24 words.”
According to Cointelegraph, the winner was Andrew Frazier, a system administrator from Chicago. According to him, the selection using the public tool BTCrecover on his gaming video card took about 25 minutes. A more powerful system would do it much faster, he noted.
He highly appreciated the initial security of the 12-word seed phrase, provided that all of them are not known to the attacker or if an additional password word is used to create it. However, Frazier reiterated his tweet, noting that the 24-word option is best.
Recall that in 2020, bitcoin investor Alistair Milne conducted an experiment to find out how much data is sufficient to hack a bitcoin wallet. Developer John Cantrell got access to the wallet with 1 BTC for 8 of the 12 words of the mnemonic phrase.
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